Sunday, October 12, 2014

Movie Review: "Bad Milo" (2013)

Duncan (Ken Marino) is your typical working stiff doing the 9-5 drudgery at a job he hates for a boss that doesn't respect him. Lately, he has been having severe stomach pains, but this typical guy is having a not so typical problem. It turns out, these stomach pains are being caused by a little creature that lives in Duncan's colon. This creature, called Milo, occasional comes out of Duncan's ass to kill and eat people. Typically, the people he kills are those who have caused Duncan stress. It turns out that getting rid of the creature is no easy task as Milo and Duncan are connected, and hurting Milo , in turn, means hurting Duncan.

This is another film in the long line of horror comedies. It seems we have be watching a lot of these types of movies lately, but these two genres seem to cross paths quite often. Comedy has its share of violence through slapstick anyway, so it's easy to add a creature or supernatural element, as well as some blood and guts, and boom, now you have a horror film. The difference here is that we have the added grotesque elements of butts and poop to entertain and disgust us.

Bad Milo himself is an interestingly designed creature. He is meant to be kind of gross and scary, but at the same time, he also looks cute and almost infant like. In his calm state, he has the standard animation formula for a cute Disney/cartoon character: a big head in proportion to its body with big, doe-like googly eyes in proportion to his head, and a small or even missing nose. When angry, Milo opens his giant mouth revealing multiple rows of sharp teeth and puts on a mean mug, quickly eliminating his cute look. The fact that he comes from someone's butt is just an added horror.

The cast puts on all around good performances. Ken Marino does a fine job playing the spineless Duncan, who is stuck in a horrible job and is too much of a wimp to speak up about anything. Gillian Jacobs doesn't get much screen time in this movie, unfortunately, because she's usually pretty funny. There are also a few other well acted supporting roles played by famous character actors. For one, we have Peter Stormare as the new age holistic psychologist, which is does absurdly yet hilariously. We also have Patrick Warburton playing the typical meat-head role he is almost always tapped to portray as Duncan's asshole boss Phil, as well as Stephen Root, who plays Duncan's absent isolationist father who is really into Eastern philosophies. Though the material they are working with is ludicrous and in some ways pretty weak, everyone in this film does a decent enough job to overlook a lacking story.

In the end, we get a running poop joke wrapped around a common Hollywood story with some dismembering of bodies by an ass monster here and there. The meek and weak willed man gets some mystical change that allows him to exact revenge on those who have wronged him, only this time, with way more stomach problems and prostate dialogue. It's got a lot of really funny moments, but other jokes fizzle out rather quickly. Milo itself is an interesting character with an even more intriguing back story...literally. I get the sense that this movie might become a cult classic, but could be wrong. This was a decent, fun watch!

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